Step # 7 : Medieval Age. Crusades and Inquisition

If the Crusades had a moral justification it was in Spain. The Christian Reconquesta began in 1085 with the capture of Toledo from the Moors by Alfonso VI, the Brave, of Leon and Castile.

To check the advance of the invading Almoravid Berber invasion that followed, it flowered with Rodrigo Diaz's, there-after know in history as The Cid, exploits in recapturing Valencia.

It would be a three hundred year struggle that would end in 1492 at Grenada, with the total eviction of Moslem presence from Iberia.

When Pope Urbain II preached the Holy Land Crusade in 1095, the Frankish nation rose up as one to take the cross and three armies marched overland via Constantinople to besiege and capture Jerusalem in 1099. It would start a two hundred year war which would see the recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin's armies in 1187 to the Muslim cause and total eviction of Crusader presence from Holy Land in 1291 by the Mamluk dynasty of slave kings.

Why did the Crusades fail?

What were its subsequent implications to both Islamic and Christian lands?

This is a key question as it resurges once again in present times.

The failure of the Crusades can be attributed to three causes :

1° It was a purely colonial operation and there was no intermingling of peoples to cement the arrival of new immigrants, as the religious divide, principal cause of invasion, forbade such intimacy. The indigenous Muslim population thus resented this ideological and cultural oppression as their own culture was identical in its rejection of the Christian creed.

2° The import of foreign population was small and the support from Greek Orthodox Empire to Crusader states limited; as amongst themselves the Schism in christian lands fueled the divide and internal dissension.

3° This foreign presence united the Arab nation into a coherent whole under both Ayyubid and Mamluk rule. The war against the Crusader became a patriotic war for the Muslims, notably as the massacre of all the population of Jerusalem during the first Crusade had fanned the flame of retribution amongst the Muslim populace in Palestine. Its lingering memory would persist for two hundred long years. And corrupt all possibility of subsequent dialogue between Orient and Occident.

The loss of all Crusades after the victorious First would have unforeseen consequences in Christian lands. As the Second Crusade to recapture Edessa failed abysmally, so the call to fight new born heresy arose in Frankish lands; the religious intolerance rife amongst the Templar strain would germinate and vent itself against the Cathar Heretic in Occitan lands; as it would also against the schismatic Orthodox, when the armies of the fourth Crusade captured Constantinople to the Latin cause, thereby corrupting all pretense of Templar creed to fight the Infidel. Now the deviance of Christian faiths was deemed as much a desecration of true latin Faith as the Infidel in Holy land.

Such theocratically fueled regression into the intolerance of the Inquisition would sound the death knell of Catholic hegemony of Christian lands. The Popes and the private militia, Templars and Hospitallers, scions of feudal elite, would not only lose the Crusades, they would also sow the seeds of the subsequent Reform and the Renaissance. Societal changes of such magnitude that they would sign the death knell of Feudalism and the emergence of the Nation-State.

The victory of the Muslims under the Mamluks did not allow a new flowering of Arab culture. The Mongol invasion, notably the third wave under Hulagu, would result in the destruction of Baghdad and the decimation of its population in 1258. That demise of Islam's house of learning would sign the death of rational culture and learning in Orient. As the slave king dynasty, would repulse militarily the Mongol invasion from Syria and Egypt, but would not be able to alight the flame of Muslim learning. Its scientific and intellectual heritage would thus fall into decadence. Although in the aftermath of Mongol and Turkomen decadence, from 1400, the rise of three gundpowder empires would see Islam flourish as cultural source in Safavid Iran, in Moghul India and in Ottoman Turkey and Middle East. But the conservative culture of religious dogma would definitively inhibit all rational, philosophical reflowering and scientific resurgence.

The flame of knowledge would be the sole property of western civilization from the Renaissance onwards. Islam never knew an age of Enlightenment; after 1400 AD.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Turks would be the final nail in the coffin of all pretense of Latin theocracy to western pre-eminence. With it, the decline of the Frankish Empire would terminate their presence inaugurated by the First Crusade in Italy and Outremer. The Hapsburg Empire of Spain and its discovery of the New World would sign the demise of the West's fascination for East, legacy of Roman days.

Christopher Columbus's discovery in 1492 of the American continent would open a new golden age of conquest for the West.